Giorgios Papadopoulos

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Giorgios Papadopoulos, Greek dictator (born May 5, 1919, Eleochorion, Greece—died June 27, 1999, Athens, Greece), led “the colonels,” the military junta that overthrew his country’s elected government on April 21, 1967, and vanquished King Constantine’s attempted counterrevolution the following December. The Papadopoulos regime was notorious for torturing political prisoners, forbidding dissent and free speech, and attempting to control university education and rewrite textbooks; its drastic conservatism led to bans on miniskirts for women and long hair for men and on the writings of Aristophanes, William Shakespeare, and Anton Chekhov, among others. As exiled Greek intellectuals and leftists scattered across Europe, the regime was widely condemned by other Western countries, though it was supported by the U.S. government for its anticommunist stance. When royalist navy officers purportedly plotted a coup in May 1973, Papadopoulos deposed the king, declared Greece a republic, and proclaimed himself president. He then freed political prisoners, promised elections, and lifted martial law until November, when his army and police killed more than 30 student demonstrators at Athens Polytechnic University. Later that month the chief of his military police, Brigadier Dimitris Ioannides, angry at Papadopoulos’s attempted reforms, overthrew his government. The eldest son of a village teacher, Papadopoulos graduated from the Officers’ Academy in 1940, served in World War II, and then fought in the Greek civil war of 1946–49. A fierce anticommunist, he joined a secret group of right-wing junior officers determined to enlarge the military’s political power, and, in fact, the Greek military managed to thwart much of the modernization and reformist policies of the ruling Centre Union party and of Prime Minister Giorgios Papandreos, elected in 1964. It was fear of another Centre Union victory in the May 1967 elections that led the junta to stage its bloodless coup. Papadopoulos’s failure to force a Greece-Cyprus union was a principal element in his downfall, which brought even more conservative rulers to power. In January 1975 he was sentenced to death for high treason and insurrection; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. “Let history judge my action,” said Papadopoulos, who to the end of his life was convinced that he had saved his country from communist rule.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Karen Sparks, Director and Editor, Britannica Book of the Year.